About
MESRI — Mekong Environmental and Social Research and Innovation — works on environmental and social change in the Mekong region. We design and run the studies, help programmes act on what comes back, and build the software that keeps the data intact in between.
The Mekong is changing faster than the evidence about it. Dams, climate pressure, migration and rapid commercial growth reshape communities in a few seasons — while the studies that describe those communities take years to commission, run and publish.
We work to close that gap in two directions at once. Better studies, designed with the people who will use the findings rather than handed to them at the end. And better instruments — tooling that takes a survey from design to a signed-off report without three manual re-keyings and a fortnight of spreadsheet archaeology.
The organisation is deliberately small and deliberately technical. The people who design the studies are the people who build the software, which is why the software fits the fieldwork.
Five phases. The deliverable at each one is something you can hold and argue with, not a status update.
Before anything is designed we agree what decision the study is meant to inform, and what result would change that decision. A question no answer could change is not worth the fieldwork.
Deliverable · Scoping note with the decision, the question and the limits
Sampling, instruments, and the analysis plan — written before data collection starts, so the analysis is not reverse-engineered from whatever came back. Instruments are piloted with real enumerators.
Deliverable · Protocol, instruments, sampling frame, analysis plan
Field teams trained on the instrument, data validated as it arrives rather than months later. This is the phase MESRI Data Hub was built for — templates deployed to KoboToolbox, submissions synced back and checked against the plan while the team is still in the field.
Deliverable · Clean, validated dataset with a documented audit trail
Against the plan agreed in phase 2. Where the data will not carry a conclusion, we say so rather than stretching it — and we show what a study that could carry it would have to look like.
Deliverable · Findings, with uncertainty stated
A report in the format the audience actually reads — donor template, policy brief, or a workshop with the programme team — plus the dataset, the instruments and enough documentation for someone else to run the next round.
Deliverable · Report, dataset, instruments, and a team that can repeat it
Base of operations and the countries we take work in. Confirm both before this page goes live.
The two figures on the right are capability counts, not claims about clients or projects — they describe what MESRI runs, and nothing else.
For a research organisation this is the single most-read section on the site — a named team with real credentials is what makes a study credible before anyone reads it. It is empty on purpose.
[ADD ROLE]
One or two sentences: discipline, where they trained, the kind of study they lead. Credentials matter more here than personality.
Name, role, discipline and a one-line background for each person. If the team is small, say so plainly and list associates separately — a short honest list reads better than a padded one.
Work with us
Study design, evaluation, or a field data process that keeps breaking — tell us what you need to find out and we will be straight with you about whether we are the right people for it.